frozenlinguophile

[frozenlinguophile]

A Quick PSA on Japanese Nicknames as they Apply to Shiro

I wanted to get this off my chest, so bear with me while I try to run through a really quick explanation on how Japanese nicknames work, and how this applies to Shiro from Voltron, because somehow "Kashi" has started popping up like crazy on Tumblr, and it is driving this Japanese speaking linguist a bit crazy. Now Tumblr ate my first version so bear with me as I try to make this even more compact this time I write this out.

Shiro in VLD is based on Shirogane Takashi from the Go Lions series. His name in kanji (Chinese characters) is 銀貴, with 銀 meaning silver (all the pilots had surnames based on words for metals in that series), and Takashi being a really, really stereotypical sort of Japanese men's name. It's quite an old name, so it can be written in kanji so many ways that I gave up on my poor name dictionary after the first 100 or so entries. 貴 is probably not the most common way to write Takashi, but it's not super rare either.

Quick note about terminology: A mora is a unit of syllable length, and Japanese kana is a moraic script. If you need more info, I will not bore you here even though I could go on about it forever, and will instead encourage you to read up on it on Wikipedia. For the layman, a mora is quite similar to a syllable and that will do for this post.

Japanese nicknames are usually two mora long, and have a tendency to be the first two mora of either the given or family name. Except in a few cases where you might see the second half of a 4 mora long male given name (as those use a 2+2 mora structure) used as the nickname (usually to distinguish them from another family member or classmate/colleague who shares the same first half of the name) it is almost always the first two mora used.

So, surprise surprise, Shiro has already been using a nickname in the standard format. It's not unusual for nicknames to be based on your surname (in his case, Shirogane). It's consistent with his character background and gender. At least in Japan, it would actually be unusual for someone else outside his family, or a close friend, to refer to him by his given name except to differentiate him from someone else with the same surname.

Now, with the million fics popping up with the Adam/Shiro pairing, I've started to see "Kashi" pop up surprisingly often in those as a nickname based on his given name.

Because Takashi is not one of those 2+2 mora given names, very consistently, a nickname will be derived from the first two mora, if it is shortened at all. But he already has an established nickname based on his surname (Shiro) so my gut feel is that he probably only would go by these names in very rough order:

1. Shiro (as his established nickname that he has used to refer to himself as)

2. Shirogane (most men in Japan tend to go by their surnames in professional contexts and this is consistent with his military background as well)

3. Takashi (by certain family and close friends, or a teacher/mentor)

4. The applicable kinship term by members of his close family (son, brother, etc.)

5. And finally, maybe, Taka, or some derivative thereof like Taka-kun, that might have only been common as a young child.

I hope this was at least somewhat informative and useful for those without a background on Japanese names.

#vld spoilers #takashi shirogane #vld shiro #voltron spoilers #voltron s7